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Dolph had cut the sirens about a mile from the hospital. We cruised into the parking lot dark and quiet. The marked car behind us had followed our lead. There was already one marked car waiting for us. The two officers were crouched beside the car, guns in hand.

We all spilled out of the dark cars, guns out. I felt like I’d been shanghaied into a Clint Eastwood movie. I couldn’t see John Burke’s car. Which meant John checked his beeper more than I did. If the vampire was safely behind metal walls, I promised to answer all beeper messages immediately. Please, just don’t let me have cost lives. Amen.

One of the uniforms who had been waiting for us duck-walked to Dolph and said, “Nothing’s moved since we got here, Sergeant.”

Dolph nodded. “Good. Special forces will be here when they can get to it. We’re on the list.”

“What do you mean, we’re on the list?” I asked.

Dolph looked at me. “Special forces has the silver bullets, and they’ll get here as soon as they can.”

“We’re going to wait for them?” I said.

“No.”

“Sergeant, we are supposed to wait for special forces when going into a preternatural situation,” the uniform said.

“Not if you’re the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team,” he said.

“You should have silver bullets,” I said.

“I’ve got a requisition in,” Dolph said.

“A requisition, that’s real helpful.”

“You’re a civvie. You get to wait outside. So don’t bitch,” he said.

“I’m also the legal vampire executioner for the State of Missouri. If I’d answered my beeper instead of ignoring it to irritate Bert, the vampire would be staked already, and we wouldn’t be doing this. You can’t leave me out of it. It’s more my job than it is yours.”

Dolph stared at me for a minute or two, then nodded very slowly.

“You should have kept your mouth shut,” Zerbrowski said. “And you’d get to wait in the car.”

“I don’t want to wait in the car.”

He just looked at me. “I do.”

Dolph started walking towards the doors. Zerbrowski followed. I brought up the rear. I was the police’s preternatural expert. If things went badly tonight, I’d earn my retainer.

All vampire victims were brought to the basement of the old St. Louis City Hospital, even those who die in a different county. There just aren’t that many morgues equipped to handle freshly risen vampires. They’ve got a special vault room with a steel reinforced everything and crosses laid on the outside of the door. There’s even a feeding tank to take the edge off that first blood lust. Rats, rabbits, guinea pigs. Just a snack to calm the newly risen.

Under normal circumstances the man’s body would have been in the vampire room, and there would have been no problem, but I had promised them that he was safe. I was their expert, the one they called to stake the dead. If I said a body was safe, they believed me. And I’d been wrong. God help me, I’d been wrong.

16

ST. LOUIS CITY HOSPITAL sat like a stubby brick giant in the middle of a combat zone. Walk a few blocks south and you could see Tony Award-winning musicals straight from Broadway. But here we could have been on the dark side of the moon. If the moon had slums.

Broken windows decorated the ground like shattered teeth.

The hospital, like a lot of inner-city hospitals, had lost money, so they had closed it down. But the morgue stayed open because they couldn’t afford to move the vampire room.

The room had been designed in the early 1900s when people still thought they could find a cure for vampirism. Lock a vampire in the vault, watch it rise and try to “cure” it. A lot of vamps cooperated because they wanted to be cured. Dr. Henry Mulligan had pioneered the search for a cure. The program was discontinued when one of the patients ate Dr. Mulligan’s face.

So much for helping the poor misunderstood vampire.

But the vault room was still used for most vampire victims. Mostly as a precaution, because these days when a vamp rose there was a vampire counsellor waiting to guide the newly risen to civilized vampire-hood.

I had forgotten about the vampire counsellor. It